I'm learning German as a Swedish speaker (but with the English to German course) and I'm constantly thinking that this must be much more difficult for an actual English-speaking person. The German and Swedish words tend to be quite similar (the the extent that I can often guess German words I don't know from the Swedish word by modifying the spelling) while the English words tend to be different.

The grammar is a different story. Much of the complications that German has has been lost in Swedish (it used to be there).

Nah, nobody said so. But if you think (colloquial) standard German is hard, try "Beamtendeutsch", that's German language fortified with legal babble. Just have a look into German forms when you have to have to declare your Income tax. Believe me, it is easier to translate Shakespeare from ancient chinese characters to Sanskrit.

It depends on you native language, I think it is easy for Dutch speakers. For English speakers it is not easy, of course there are more difficult languages such as Polish, Russian, Japanese, Arabic etc.

I am a native Dutch speaker, but for me English is much easier than German.
The German grammar is sooo.. more difficult than the Dutch grammar. While the English grammar is much easier than the Dutch grammar.

Maybe?
Or maybe not, because of the many "false friends" (words which are written nearly the same, but their meaning is completely different).

However, the German sentence construction is more like the Dutch sentence construction than the English one, and the German pronunciation is easy for Dutch native speakers.
I agree with"German is easier for Dutch native speakers, than for English native speakers", but it is definitely not easy.

German learning Dutch here. Actually, what you mention turned out to be a vicious trap. There's tons of words whose meanings shifted since the languages separated in the 15th century. Thus I tumble over lots of "false friends", i.e. similar words which carry misleadingly different meanings. Take the words for "different" as an example: